


The Heart's Exact Twin

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Temporary Character Death, GaaLee Fest 2019, Implied Rock Lee/OFC, M/M, Red String of Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 20:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20477012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: “If that bad person were your soulmate,” Gaara says, rocks cracking between his fingers, “what would you do then? Would you cast them aside?”Lee looks down to his chest, where the long, thin curl of his heartline stretches into the far distance. To tell the truth, he has no idea who is at the end of it.Written for the GaaLee Summertime of Love Fest 2019, Day 14: Pick Your Own Trope





	The Heart's Exact Twin

**Author's Note:**

> Title is adapted from [Oats We Sow by Gregory and the Hawk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0rE8dI6dRg). 
> 
> Thank you to my lovely wife and beta [trustmeimthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe) for the super speedy, last-minute beta job. All remaining mistakes are my own. 
> 
> Also check out the rest of the [Summertime of Love Fest](https://puregaalee.tumblr.com/post/184654222850/gaalee-festival-2019every-way-i-could-love-you) on Tumblr or search #gaaleefest19!

The sound of the breeze whistling between posts of bone is eerie, unlike anything Lee has ever heard before. It’s part mournful, plaintive cry and part the hoot of an owl startled at midnight. Lee shifts, his whole body on fire, head throbbing. The scratch of tree bark through his jumpsuit is acute, the sensation sharper than before his injury. 

On little curls of the haunted air’s breath, he smells blood and sand. Gaara is a few feet away, dappled shadows freckling his cheeks, but his presence is overwhelming even at this distance.

“The person that’s important to you isn’t always good,” Gaara says, his voice slow and thoughtful. Lee never took him for the introspective type, but then, he hardly recognizes this new, calm Gaara at all. His sharp edges have been sanded down, but there are still crags and cracks in his personality: in the sharp way he interrupts when others are speaking, in the jagged heaves of his shoulders when he breathes, in the way he speaks to the coppery air as if making some grand proclamation, refusing to meet Lee’s eye. 

Gaara leans back against his tree, as if satisfied he’s uncovered some greater truth. 

Lee rankles. 

“You don’t have to take someone bad as your important person!” 

Gaara tilts his head, turning to look at Lee - really _look_ at him - for the first time since he arrived on the battlefield. His blue-green eyes are cold when they meet Lee’s. He doesn’t blink. 

“No,” he says, in a voice that brooks no argument. Sweat has dripped down the side of his face and left long tracks on his sandstone-colored skin. Lee’s never seen him physically exerted, even when he was breaking down screaming inside a robin’s egg of sand in the middle of the chuunin exam arena. The fight must have taken more out of him than Lee thought. “Even if you know they’re bad … a person can’t defeat loneliness.” 

Lee’s gaze tears away to stare at the ossified corpse suspended above them. He isn’t sure what to say. He wonders if he could walk, now, if he tried. He presses the heel of his left foot to the ground. Pain sparks and buzzes up his shinbone. Not yet, then. 

He’d like to get moving, to head back to Konoha and report back on the status of Sasuke-kun and the Sound ninja, but he’s not sure if his legs can bear his weight just yet. There are few things Lee would less rather be doing right now than sitting under these trees with Gaara, staring at a blood-flecked cadaver that sways like a sick windchime in the air, debating about philosophy. 

Ever since his surgery, it’s been important that Lee keep busy. The more he moves, the less his brain has time to think about how much pain he’s in. Words keep his mouth occupied, but they don’t cut the tension of his aching muscles. And even though Gaara is a friend - or at least an ally, now - Lee can’t quite shake the feeling of being looked down upon by someone whose strength and speed dwarfs his own. Even if it’s Gaara’s own fault that he’s weaker now.

Not that Lee blames him. He would have done the same. _Tried_ to do the same, and just wasn’t strong enough. 

But Gaara’s snide little comments, stated bluntly in that low, flat voice, older than his years, make Lee’s blood burn in his veins. 

Gaara’s breath has started coming harder, rough pants of air that cross the distance between them to meet Lee’s ears. There’s a crunch as a hand drops to the ground and clenches in the dirt.

“If that bad person were your soulmate,” Gaara says, rocks cracking between his fingers, “what would you do then? Would you cast them aside?”

Lee looks down to his chest, where the long, thin curl of his heartline stretches into the far distance. To tell the truth, he has no idea who is at the end of it. It could be anyone. It could be someone as terrible as Orochimaru. It could even be someone worse, if such a person exists. 

If Lee could, he would tangle his fingers around that fishing-line-thin strand of red energy and _tug_, just to prove to himself that the gods hadn’t matched him with someone dreadful. 

Lee has always believed in the inherent _goodness_ of others. That even if someone is cruel, they can be taught to be kind. He also believes, deep down, that if you’re a noble, strong enough person, the universe should unite you with someone worthy of your qualities. 

He had thought, briefly, that Sakura might be that match for him - had mistaken the stretch of his heartline _through_ her as it being linked to her. Of course, he hadn’t known - he had been young, and foolish. He had never seen what it looked like when two heartlines linked - still hasn’t now, but at least he knows that your soulmate is supposed to be able to see your heartline, too. 

When Sakura had looked at his chest, where he jabbed his thumb when he swore to protect her for the rest of his life, her mouth had wrinkled in disgust. 

Sakura is a _good_ person, beautiful and caring and brave. Lee doesn’t know for sure who her soulmate is, but when he saw the way she wept when Sasuke went missing, he wondered if the gods would truly be so unfair as to match her with someone so cold. 

… But then he had also seen Naruto screaming with tears in his eyes, and he hadn’t known what to think. Neji thinks Team Seven’s heartlines are all snarled together. (Lee has never asked, but he suspects that Neji can see the connections between soulmates with his Byakugan.) It’s rare, but it’s not unheard of, for a person’s heartline to end in more than one place. It would make a sort of sense, the way they all seem so caught up in one another, messily orbiting each other, alternately lashing out and holding fast. 

So what would Lee do, then, if his soulmate turned out to be someone as harsh, as broken as Sasuke? Would he try to chase them down and fix them, try to turn them to the light, the way Naruto has? Would he let himself slip into a little bit of their darkness, too, like Sakura?

“I- “ he starts.

“You can’t disregard fate,” Gaara cuts him off. When Lee looks over, he sees that Gaara has rolled over onto his knees while Lee was lost in thought. He’s staring at a pile of dark sand in his palm, fingers curled. “What if your only choice was between a monster and loneliness?”

Somehow, Lee doesn’t think Gaara is talking about Orochimaru any more. 

“Do you know who your soulmate is?” he asks. Maybe Gaara just needs a little reassurance that, despite his past, he really has changed for the better. His words and actions may be a bit uneven, a bit erratic, but he’s no monster. At least, not anymore. 

Gaara’s transformation under Naruto’s care gives Lee hope that Sasuke might see the same light. 

“I killed her,” Gaara replies, and Lee’s face drains in shock. 

“_Why?_”

“I was six years old, and she was terrified of me. She cried for her mother and yelled at me to go away. She said she would never love a monster like me.” Gaara turns his hand over, and the sand trickles to the grass and disappears in the lush green growth. “I couldn’t bear it. The rejection of the one person who was meant to be guaranteed to love me.” Gaara brushes his hands on his pants and stands, then walks over to where Lee’s sitting. “Are you able to walk?” he asks, in the same uninflected voice with which he’d spoken those terrible words, as if the story of his shattered past were no different than planning the logistics of a mission. 

Lee’s mind races. He’s never met someone who didn’t have a living soulmate, at least not that he knows of. If such a thing happened, it would be too tragic to discuss. In the corner of his eye, his heartline flickers.

“What does it look like?” he asks, despite his better judgment. Did Gaara’s heartline wither when she died? Does it hang limp like a cut string from his chest? Does he still see it stretching to his soulmate’s resting place?

Gaara bends down, takes Lee’s uninjured hand in his, and hauls Lee to his feet with a surprising strength for his narrow frame. His face is very close to Lee’s, and Lee can see where tiny blood vessels have burst at the corners of his dusky lips from shouting. 

“It looks like a hole,” Gaara says without stepping away. “Right. Here.” He presses two fingers into the space next to Lee’s breastbone that his heartline grows from. 

“Didn’t it hurt?” Lee asks. 

“At the time, everything in my life was pain. It hurt no more than any other death.” Gaara brings a hand up to claw at his heart. “I hardly feel it now.”

Somehow, Lee doubts that, but he doesn’t say it. He’s silent as he lets Gaara sling his injured left arm over his sharp-boned shoulder as they start the long trek back to Konoha.

In the back of his mind, he wonders why Gaara doesn’t simply use the sand to carry him. Instead he supports Lee’s heavy frame on his slight body, even as his breathing grows heavy and his footfalls stumble in the roots and underbrush of the forest. 

It doesn’t seem worth asking. 

He’d rather stand on his own two feet anyway, even if he has to lean on someone else to do it.

  


* * *

  


Lee has seen dead bodies before. Never before have they evoked in him a feeling like the one that fills him when he stares down at Gaara’s bloodless face. Even with the sooty marks around his closed eyes, his face is impossibly young, stripped of the harsh tension he has always carried in his expression. He’s so still he could be a doll, a puppet with cut strings. A corpse. 

Lee’s heard that the death of one’s soulmate is the most painful thing a person can experience. He has heard of people whose soulmates died and they were in such pain they simply withered away. Losing your soulmate was meant to be excruciating: something you would never recover from for the rest of your life. If it feels even a little bit worse than this, it must be truly unbearable. 

Before this moment, the mission had seemed more adventure than a threat to anyone’s life. He hadn’t truly connected the word _rescue_ with the notion of any true risk to the Kazekage’s safety. 

Of course Gaara would have been able to handle himself, Lee had thought. He was one of the strongest people Lee knew, a true paragon of integrity and will, of the sort only paralleled by Lee’s magnificent teacher. 

When he sees Gaara lying there, red hair a splash of blood in the green grass, he feels an _ache_ so profound it can hardly be called pain. Sakura’s hands are so gentle when they touch his chest, hesitant, and this enrages Lee. Shouldn’t she be trying harder to save him?

But - how hard can you try to save someone who has already died?

Naruto is making a scene, sobbing and yelling, flinging his arms in the air like he’s losing his tether on reality. All Lee can think about is Gaara’s soulmate, the little girl that he killed ten years ago. Is she waiting for him, in the darkness on the other side of this life? Does she forgive him, now that he’s made the greatest sacrifice on behalf of his village? 

Will those that remain remember Gaara as the hero he is now, or as the monster he was then? 

And will they recognize the role they played in his monstrousness? 

For the first time in his life, Lee can’t bring a single tear to his eyes. The communicator strap around his neck chokes him when he swallows back a sound. Gaara’s body is motionless, almost fragile-looking with his arms limp by his side, a cracked piece of pottery returning to the earth. His skin - his _flesh_, which Lee has never seen uncovered by the sand before - is a malnourished grey pallor, rarely seen by the sun. 

It seems wrong, that the sun should only be allowed to see him now. 

Lee’s fists clench until blood stings his palms, but he doesn’t move. Naruto’s outburst seems to carry on forever, the words a blur in Lee’s indifferent ears. 

And then, Chiyo-sama is kneeling over Gaara’s chest, with Naruto at her shoulder. 

And then, the old woman weakens and falls forward.

And then, Gaara stirs. 

It’s at that moment that Lee realizes he hasn’t breathed since he saw Naruto’s clones deposit Gaara’s body on the ground. 

There’s no time to put words to any of what Lee is feeling in that moment. The field is suddenly swarmed with Sand shinobi, who arrive as one on whisper-silent feet. All of Gaara’s subordinates, his friends, his siblings, the village elders - they surround him. Everyone’s laughing, cheering Gaara on, singing his praises even as an old woman’s dead body kneels on the soft pillow of the grass. 

Lee and his teammates are pushed to the back of the ring of bodies. 

It’s only hours later, back at the Suna gates, when Lee realizes the location of the vacancy in his chest where that pain had bloomed. 

He studies his heartline. It still stretches over the horizon.

  


* * *

  


Everything on the battlefield is the hazy green of impending death. Lee’s muscles burn with exertion, his very skin prickling with the residue of evaporating sweat and chakra exhaustion. 

When Gai-sensei opens the Eighth Gate, the red steam around him appears to Lee as a muted brown, the color of old blood. He’s in awe of his teacher’s great strength as much as he is terrified. Tears flow freely down his face and turn to steam on his flashpoint skin. 

The Fourth Hokage barks an order, and Lee, ever dutiful, falls into line to support Gaara as instructed. 

Gaara’s face is pale and drawn, but his eyes and mouth flicker with some unspoken intensity. Lee recalls his impassioned speech to the gathered Allied Shinobi, the way his voice had carried, self-assured, over their bowed and bickering heads. Gaara’s voice is different now than it was then - raspy with fatigue, harsh with emotion. Whatever mask had previously covered his true feelings has cracked away in the heat of war, and Lee sees him now as he truly is: radiant, powerful, grand of heart and splendid of spirit.

But brittle, too, in the way that his voice breaks when he shouts Kakashi-sensei’s name, in the way his lip trembles when Gai-sensei throws himself, incendiary and miraculous, against Madara Uchiha’s body. 

Lee sees all of this and more in the instant before Gai-sensei will surely die. The loss of it is almost too much to bear, after Neji’s death. Lee’s heart feels rent apart, shredded in two and open like a gaping wound, as if he had jammed a thumb into his heartline’s chakra point and opened the Eighth Gate himself. 

Despite the best support their allies can offer and his unflagging optimism, for Gai-sensei, the Eighth Gate is an incontrovertible death sentence.

Until it isn’t - until Naruto appears on the horizon, radiant as a curl of sunshine loosed from the heliosphere, and deposits Gai-sensei at their feet with a promise that he’ll be _okay_.

Naruto doesn’t seem able to explain it, but over the fizzle of chakra and the clashing of bodies, Lee can hear Gai-sensei’s breathing. If anything, it makes his tears all the more intense, until his eyes burn redder than the Eighth Gate’s bloody steam. 

Gaara lays a hand on Lee’s shoulder and pulls him into a defensive position. In a brief exchange of nods, Lee feels certain that he’s ready to offer the best of himself in service to his sensei - who gave so much - and in service to the entire shinobi world. And to have Gaara here, fighting alongside him, his sand supporting Lee’s strength, well - Lee couldn’t ask for more. 

It seems just moments before Gaara’s sand propels him into the air, the weightlessness oddly comforting and familiar, rescuing him from the battlefield. 

And then, the moon goes red. His chakra gates shutter, and Lee looks _up_ \- 

_\- In his dream, Lee is united with his soulmate, whose form is as vague and insubstantial as a mist. Nonetheless, he knows he loves them, knows he would die for them. His legs sing through the air when he kicks, Neji and Tenten cheering him on. His enemies fall at his feet, and Gai-sensei stands behind him, beaming and proud and alive and whole. The space between his heart and his soulmate’s has never been shorter, his heartline finally finding a home. He presses his lips to theirs and it feels like tasting clean air and he’s happy, so happy. When he opens his eyes to finally, finally see his soulmate up close, the eyes that meet his are a soft jade green - _

The whole battlefield awakes with a simultaneous intake of breath. For a moment, oxygen is a scarce commodity. 

All around, everyone is shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. Lee makes out the bipartite lobes of Gaara’s gourd in the clearing visual fog ahead. Sand crunches under his feet when he staggers to stand. 

Gaara’s head swivels to stare at him, eyes wide. He blinks, just once, and then that emotionless mask falls back over his face. 

Lee wonders what Gaara dreamed of, when the moon went red. Did he dream his soulmate back to life? His dead mother? Did he unwrap all the tragedy of his childhood, unseal the tailed beast from his stomach? In his dream, did he choose to be the Kazekage at all? 

In the heat of the battle, Lee hadn’t been thinking about his heartline. It’s only now, when the green blur of chakra has faded from around his face, that he realizes his heartline no longer vanishes into the thin obscurity of the horizon. Still suspended on Gaara’s platform of sand, his heartline dances downward, towards the gathered mass of shinobi blinking the Rinnegan’s reflection from their eyes. Whoever his soulmate is, they’re _here_, somewhere on this vast battlefield. 

So why is it that he can’t tear his eyes away from Gaara’s back?

Lee presses his fingers to the spot on his chest. Underneath, he can feel the subtle pulse of his Eighth Gate, daring him to open it.

  


* * *

  


“Are they soulmates, do you think?”

“Who?” Lee asks, mouth full of his fourth bowl of ramen in as many days. 

Gaara scoffs, and his elbow jogs against Lee’s and makes him nearly spill his glass of water.

“Naruto and Hinata.”

Lee swallows noisily, forcing a ball of noodles past the lump in his throat. He shrugs.

“Maybe,” he replies. “I did not think to ask. As long as they love each other, I don’t know that it matters.”

Gaara’s lips purse in thought. As many missions and meals as they’ve shared, Lee has never seen him so contemplative as he’s been these past few days. He seems to be mulling over a great many things in that genius head of his. 

Lee would ask him more about what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t want to pry. Besides, the thoughts of geniuses often fly right over Lee’s head. He’s a simple man, with simple thoughts. Straightforward. He decides what he wants, and then he seeks it out. He rarely spends much time in consideration of the whys and wherefores and underlying philosophies, unless of course he can link them back to Gai-sensei’s teachings on youth and perseverance. 

“Do you think that’s possible,” Gaara says slowly, staring into his bowl of miso char-siu ramen as if it contained the secrets of the universe swirling in its salty depths, “to love someone who isn’t your soulmate?”

Lee has grown a lot since the last time he and Gaara had what he secretly thinks of as The Soulmate Talk. He’s touched, truthfully, that Gaara has thought to seek his counsel on this matter not once, but twice. Gaara is an excellent shinobi, and an even better friend, but Lee knows that matters of the heart sometimes snarl him in their thorns. Although Lee has little practical experience in the matter, he has years of Gai-sensei’s impassioned teachings to inform his opinions, so he is always happy to lend a helping hand. 

He brings his depth of wisdom and the breadth of experience to bear on his answer when he replies, “I don’t know.” 

Gaara sighs. 

“You don’t know.” 

Lee shrugs and slurps up another mouthful of noodles. He chews noisily and swallows before he speaks. 

“_Anything_ is possible,” Lee recites, clenching a fist and drawing on the profundity of his sensei’s words, “as long as you are guided by the hot-blooded passion of your own youthful spirit!” 

Gaara’s eyes narrow, and he knocks Lee’s hand down with a puckish swat of sand. There’s something so striking about his face when he does that. Lee wonders if it’s looks like these that have Suna’s kunoichi whispering about their Kazekage behind their hands and scratching his name next to theirs on scraps of paper studded with hearts. 

“That’s what your teacher thinks,” Gaara says, voice so low that Lee has to lean towards him to hear it. “But what do you think?”

Lee stares down at the space between their wrists on the countertop, the sharp angle where Gaara’s ulna ends just centimeters away from his own thickly wrapped bandages. Lee’s heartline gives a little jerk, fluttering to the right and past his field of vision - his soulmate must be moving. 

He looks Gaara in the eye - the thing he wants, right in front of him: simple, straightforward - and for the first time speaks his heart. 

“I think you can fall in love with anyone.” 

There’s an alley behind Ichiraku that Gaara tugs him to, once their bowls are empty and their eyes heavy with fatigue. 

Lee has always outpaced Gaara in matters of the heart, his mind more romantically inclined, constantly searching the horizon for the endpoint of his heartline. This time, it seems Gaara has beaten him to the punch. 

And a punch it is, when Gaara’s lips crush against his, pushing Lee’s shoulders up against the thin plywood that makes up Ichiraku Ramen’s restored back wall, knocking the breath from him and leaving him panting. Gaara’s mouth is as hard as his eyes in battle, fingers digging into Lee’s shoulders like the claws of an animal fighting for its life. When Lee gentles him backwards by his narrow waist, bare fingertips sweaty on the thick red canvas of Gaara’s jacket, Gaara’s teeth catch on his lower lip, unwilling to let go. 

Gaara breathes heavily, shoulders jogging upwards to his ears as his eyes search Lee’s face for a reaction. 

“I don’t care who your soulmate is,” he spits, as if daring Lee to object. “I want you to be mine.” 

Lee just smiles at him. 

“Okay,” he says.

“We’re leaving in an hour.”

It’s not much time, but Lee moves faster than almost anyone in the Five Great Nations, even when his heart is struggling to keep up with his body. He cups Gaara’s chin with his hand, soft and cautious, taming the beast that snaps its jaws behind his eyes. 

Lee has always had the right touch for the creatures of the forest - neither too forward nor too afraid - so different from how he approaches most people, with his eyes and fists blazing. It’s this approach that he takes when he kisses Gaara, softening his lips when Gaara’s teeth lash out at him, cradling Gaara’s head to his chest when he grows short of breath. 

“_Yes_,” Gaara hisses, drawing out the _s_, his forehead pressed to the space over Lee’s heart. 

Lee’s heartline passes right through him and curves onward, out of the alley and into the distance. 

Lee closes his eyes, then lifts Gaara’s face to kiss him again.

  


* * *

  


The morning of Naruto’s wedding, there’s a hawk on Lee’s windowsill, heralding the Kazekage’s arrival. 

The past few months have been a veritable flurry of correspondence, messenger birds sailing back and forth from the damp skies of Konoha to the dry winds of Suna. Gaara’s letters are as terse as he is - brief and to the point - and unflinching in their honesty. More than once, Lee has found himself in tears over a scrap of sun-bleached paper and Gaara’s tight scrawl. 

Which is how Lee knows that Gaara is having second thoughts (and third, and fourth). With the perspicacity granted only by hindsight, Gaara is no longer so sure that he should have acted as brashly as he did. His heart is torn in two directions - between keeping Lee for himself, and relinquishing Lee to seek his soulmate. 

“_I hate the thought of sharing anything, but especially you,_” his most recent letter reads. 

Nonetheless, he has booked a hotel room only for Kankuro, and Lee spreads clean sheets on his bed and double-checks his cabinets for Gaara’s favorite brand of black tea after the hawk departs, spiraling into the pale blue sky with a broken cry. 

Lee has tried to reassure Gaara that it’s his choice to make, too, in uncountable words and florid prose - it doesn’t matter, to Lee, who his heartline is connected to, not as long as Gaara is _right there_ \- but he still feels the hesitation in Gaara’s words. Sees it, too, when their eyes finally meet across a table at Naruto and Hinata’s reception.

Kankuro checks a watch he isn’t wearing and excuses himself to go speak to Shino. Tenten locks firm hands on the handles of Gai-sensei’s wheelchair and steers him to the Hokage before he has time to bellow a spirited greeting.

Lee clears his throat. 

Gaara reaches across the table and takes Lee’s hand, studying the contrast of his skin against Lee’s unbandaged fingers. They make an attractive picture together, Lee has to admit, Gaara’s skin smooth and unmarked where Lee’s is rough and calloused. A study in contrasts. And Gaara is so handsome right now, the cut of his jacket bracketing his angular shoulders, his hair tidily parted but still youthfully ruffled. Lee aches just to look at him, feels it in that familiar space in his chest. 

Peeking through the dark green plackets of his Mandarin jacket, the red of his heartline quivers. 

Gaara presses a soft kiss to the back of Lee’s scarred knuckles, his lips sandstone-smooth. 

He parts his lips as if to speak. 

The ringing of a chopstick against a wine glass cuts him off. 

“Ah,” Lee demurs, eyes scanning the assembled guests, so many of them hand-in-hand, “Iruka-sensei is about to make his speech.” 

Something shutters down behind Gaara’s light eyes, but he doesn’t let go of Lee’s hand as he tugs him over to the head table. 

With so many friends and well-wishers around, it’s easier not to speak the thoughts on their minds. And when they finally make it back to the dark of Lee’s apartment, Gaara’s lips rummy with spiced wine and his words slow, well - they have weeks and months of time apart to make up for. Perhaps words are better suited to the page. Words, after all, can’t delight in unfastening gold-plated buttons with achingly slow fingers. 

“What did you end up getting them as a present?” Lee asks, afterwards, staring out his bedroom window at the star-flecked sky. “I saw Killer Bee’s pillows - what a novel and creative method of communication!”

“They were tacky,” Gaara says, his head resting on Lee’s bare chest. Lee strokes his hand through Gaara’s coarse hair and chuckles softly.

“If you say so.”

“I got them a pair of _Hoya kerrii_, Sweetheart Hoya, male and female cultivars.” Gaara pauses, and his fingertip traces idle patterns in the dip between Lee’s pectorals. “In Suna, it’s said that they can be nourished by one’s heartline, but only when it’s joined to a person’s soulmate.”

“How romantic,” Lee sighs. “Is that really true?” 

Gaara rolls over, and Lee suddenly finds him propped up between Lee’s spread legs, staring into his eyes with an odd expression.

“No,” he says. “They’re just plants, Lee. They’ll grow wherever there’s the right water and nutrients.” 

Gaara only stays one night. Suna can’t spare him, Temari, _and_ Kankuro for so long, not when all the other Kage are similarly indisposed and every village is lending its shinobi to Konoha for the wedding. 

“I’ll write,” Lee promises, fingers sorting the rough strands of Gaara’s hair in front of his seashell-pink ears. His gray jacket is wrinkled, a blush-red mark just behind the crease of his jaw. Lee would give it a twin on the other side if they had the time. The sand will cover it momentarily, anyway. 

“Don’t,” Gaara stops him, and Lee’s face falls. His hands drop to his side, fisting in the worn hem of his too-long nightshirt. He shifts uneasily on bare legs, wishing he were better dressed for this conversation.

“Why?” he breathes.

“You know why.” Gaara’s voice is just a whisper, a single note above breath. “You’ve never met your soulmate - I can’t deny you that opportunity.”

Tears, hot and wet and rude, spring hurriedly to Lee’s eyes.

“But I think I love you.”

Gaara’s eyes go wide. In them, Lee swears he can see both their hearts breaking. 

“Until you’ve met _them_, how can you even know what love is?”

While Gaara closes the door in front of him, Lee’s heartline slips and trails out the window on the opposite side of his kitchen. 

He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see it there, pulsing the same red as the lining of Hinata’s wedding kimono.

  


* * *

  


“I see you found her,” Gaara says, coolly, in Lee’s doorway. 

Lee knew there was a Kage meeting today, but he didn’t expect to see Gaara _here_, not so soon. Since he’s been on paternity leave, he’s been a bit out of the loop of the village’s goings-on. He had hoped, if he was lucky, that he might catch Gaara at the gates before his departure, but- 

Metal starts to fuss, and Lee bounces him on one hip. His son babbles happily, chubby hands slapping at his father’s jumpsuit. 

“I did, but- “ 

“Where is she. I want to meet her.” Gaara’s voice is uninflected, his eyes the dispassionate cast of emotionlessness that make Lee certain he’s hiding something. “ … to make sure that she’s treating you right.” _Ah,_ Lee thinks, _possessiveness_. 

“In Kumo.”

Metal squirms, and Lee jostles him to his other hip. He squeals in babyish delight, wriggling. A wrinkle forms between Gaara’s eyes, his gaze flicking between Metal’s face and Lee’s. 

They look just alike, Lee’s been told; Metal hardly resembles his mother. Lee can see it too, except around the eyes, sharp and lidded like those of the Kumo kunoichi who held the other end of his heartline. Strong genes in the Lee family, it seems. 

“When will she move here?”

Lee shakes his head, a smile starting to tickle the corners of his lips. Metal starts chewing the collar of his vest; he’s teething, and the pain keeps him up most nights until Lee finds the right texture for his mouth. Lee worries over the coarseness of the fabric for a moment, but then decides to let him chew. It’s better than the screaming alternative. “She won’t.”

“Then you’ll move there.” Gaara’s lower lip juts out in the ghost of a pout. Kumo is quite a bit farther from Suna than Konoha is. 

“No.”

“But your son- “ 

“Metal’s mother is more than happy for him to remain here with me,” Lee blurts, all in a rush, getting the words out for the first time since this impromptu interrogation began on his doorstep at 8 o’clock at night.

“I don’t understand.” Gaara is as blunt as a child’s kunai, but his gaze is as finely honed as a jounin’s weapon. In the hallway of Lee’s apartment building, the fluorescent lights flicker. Lee hears the grating hiss of Gaara’s gourd rustling on his hip. He hates any uncertainty, Lee knows. 

“We tried, but- ” Lee shakes his head again. His cheeks heat with fondness as he studies Gaara’s bewildered face. “I know she’s my soulmate, and I’m supposed to be hers, too, but … maybe if you and I had never met, then- ” 

Gaara’s eyes narrow to slits. He takes a step forward into Lee’s doorway, his movements sure as a predator’s. His head tilts to the right as he assesses Lee’s expression. A hand falls onto the shoulder that isn’t dominated by a drooling baby. 

Lee beams at him, willing Gaara to understand. “In a world where _you_ exist…” 

Gaara moves in until his mouth is a breath from Lee’s, but Lee has one more thing he has to tell him. 

“I couldn’t choose anyone but you.” 

The words are but a sigh between their brushing lips, their kiss hurried but sure. 

Gaara walks Lee backwards and shuts the door behind them with his foot. Metal can stay at Tenten’s tonight, Lee is sure she won’t mind. 

The late-summer sunset cuts through his apartment from the window behind his kitchen sink and stains the whole front room pink and orange. 

In the glow that turns Gaara’s hair from red to blushing copper, Lee can’t see his heartline at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I made a playlist for Day 13 of the Fest (Trope: Love Redeems). If you like GaaLee feels, you might like this playlist, too. [Check it out here!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2XKMmq2pMojN7fP0ITaT2b)


End file.
